Technology: Grab Your Goggles, 3-D Is Back!

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The first three-dimensional-movie craze earned the technology a bad reputation that has lasted for decades. The hundred or so 3-D feature films and short subjects produced between late 1952 and early 1954 rarely rose above the spear-chucking Bwana Devil or the gore-splattered Creature from the Black * Lagoon. But what really killed 3-D in the '50s -- and in subsequent revivals in the '60s, '70s and '80s -- was not so much bad movies as bad 3-D. Even classics like Kiss Me Kate and Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder have effects that when seen in 3-D, tend to pull the eyeballs in directions that nature never intended. Successful 3-D movies require that two stereoscopic images be kept scrupulously aligned and in focus, and this technological challenge has virtually overwhelmed a generation of filmmakers.

Until now. Exploiting advances in computer graphics, liquid-crystal technology and extra-wide-format films, a Canadian company has developed a new technique that makes objects pop out of the screen with unprecedented clarity and brilliance and causes no eyestrain. The new technology, called Imax Solido, was created by Imax Systems, the Toronto-based company that makes movies to be shown on screens the size of six-story buildings. The first Solido film, a largely computer-generated extravaganza called Echoes of the Sun that was co-produced by the Japanese firm Fujitsu, opened last week at the Fujitsu Pavilion at Expo '90, an international fair in Osaka. Showgoers queued up for a chance to park themselves in front of a huge wraparound screen, strap on a pair of battery-powered goggles and enter a startlingly realistic 3-D world.

The goggles are the key to the Solido system. Taking the place of the funny cardboard-frame glasses used to watch old-style 3-D movies, the eyewear creates a stereoscopic effect by using lenses filled with liquid-crystal diodes, the same material that forms the numerals on the face of a digital wristwatch. When jolted by an electrical current, an LCD lens can instantly switch from being essentially transparent to being totally opaque -- like an efficient electronic shutter. Controlled by an infrared signal broadcast from the projection booth, the goggles' left and right lenses open and close 24 times a second, in synchronization with a pair of Imax projectors showing first the left-eye view and then the right-eye view of any scene. The 3-D effect is unusually crisp because the projectors are extremely stable, the separation of right- and left-eye views is precise, and the movie frames are ten times as large as those of a typical 35-mm film.